In Detail

Web applications are exposed to a variety of threats and vulnerabilities at the authentication, authorization, service, and domain object levels. Spring Security can help secure these applications against those threats.

Spring Security is a popular application security solution for Java applications. It is widely used to secure standalone web applications, portlets, and increasingly REST applications. It is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. It is the de-facto standard for securing Spring-based applications and it is currently used to secure numerous demanding environments including government agencies, military applications, and central banks.

"Spring Security 3.x Cookbook" is a repository of recipes to help you successfully secure web applications against threats and vulnerabilities at the authentication and session level layers using the Spring Security framework. We will not only explore Spring-based web applications, but also Java-based and Grails-based applications that can use Spring Security as their security framework. Apart from conventional web applications, we will also look at securing portlets, RESTful web service applications, and other non-web applications.

This book will also take you through how to integrate Spring Security with other popular web frameworks/technologies such as Vaadin, EJB, and GWT. In addition to testing and debugging the implemented security measures, this book will also delve into finer aspects of Spring Security implementation such as how it deals with concurrency, multitenancy, and customization, and we will even show you how to disable it.

This book gives you an overview of Spring Security and its implementation with various frameworks. It starts with container-based authentication before taking you on a tour of the main features of Spring Security. It demonstrates security concepts like BASIC, FORM, and DIGEST authentication and shows you how to integrate the Spring Security framework with various frameworks like JSF, struts2, Vaadin, and more.

The book also demonstrates how to utilize container managed security without JAAS. Then, we move on to setting up a struts2 application before showing you how to integrate Spring Security with other frameworks like JSF, Groovy, Wicket, GWT, and Vaadin respectively.

This book will serve as a highly practical guide and will give you confidence when it comes to applying security to your applications. It’s packed with simple examples which show off each concept of Spring Security and which help you learn how it can be integrated with various frameworks.

Approach

This book follows a cookbook style exploring various security solutions provided by Spring Security for various vulnerabilities and threat scenarios that web applications may be exposed to at the authentication and session level layers.

Who this book is for

This book is for all Spring-based application developers as well as Java web developers who wish to implement robust security mechanisms into web application development using Spring Security.

Readers are assumed to have a working knowledge of Java web application development, a basic understanding of the Spring framework, and some knowledge of the fundamentals of the Spring Security framework architecture. Working knowledge of other web frameworks such as Grails and so on would be an added advantage to exploit the whole breadth of recipes provided in this book, but this is not mandatory.